Richard's blog

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Firstly, a confession. My last post to this site - one of my shortest and least considered - was entirely taken up with gloating about Geoff Hoon's resignation. In my haste I overlooked something rather important. Geoff Hoon was one of the best Secretary of States we've had.

I know it's a radical position, but consider the facts. Hoon entered the Cabinet less than a year ago and made a massive impact. He seized upon Heathrow's expansion and made it his own; fighting Tories, backbenchers, environmentalists and pretty much everyone else to keep the expansion on track. And by doing so, he caused it to derail, spectacularly.

Hoon, you see, was such an unlikeable little shit that he made opposing Heathrow the obvious option. Watching him stagger about the Commons was enough to turn even the staunchest expansionist a deep shade of green. Nothing showed the strength of opposition to the third runway than Hoon having to round up his backbenchers at gunpoint to vote against an opposition resolution.

Look back over the last ten months: a motorway expansion programme left in ruins; airport expansion all but wiped out; every major Government transport initiative collapsing and Hoon's oily fingermarks everywhere. While lesser politicians might have given an inch, Hoon wedged himself into a corner and sat there chewing his own arm off like a rabid dog.

Now the great man is heading to Copenhagen. Environmentalists are scared: this is the climate change denier, they say, who wants to expand airports and tarmac the countryside. But they are wrong: for all his talks of "tree-hugging hoolah" he's obviously a deep ecologist hellbent on exposing the talks as a market-driven folly. After all, this is the man who destroyed any support for neo-Liberal interventionism by dragging us into Iraq. I wouldn't rule anything out now the wild card is in play.

Geoff Hoon has 'resigned' as Secretary of State for Transport.

Don't let the door hit you in the arse on the way out, Geoff.

If 2008 went down in the history books as the year of airport expansion plans, then 2009 will be long feted as the year those plans crashed back down to earth. Confirming rumours we've been hearing for several month now, BAA have finally conceded defeat and asked the Government to delay the public inquiry into Stansted Airport's expansion. Although BAA won't admit it yet, this means that the inquiry, and proposed expansion, won't happen. Is that champagne corks tins of cider I hear opening?

There are a few reasons for this, all of them good news for environmentalists. Firstly, BAA has no money and can't afford the inquiry. They are inches from having their credit status downgraded, which would leave them unable to secure their enormous debts. In economics speak, this leaves them "proper fucked"; so fucked, in fact, that the Government has initiated plans to nationalise them should the receivers get called in.

Secondly, BAA has been ordered to sell Stansted by the Competition Commission. In a rising market, with more and more people flying each year, BAA would be aggressively seeking permision to expand, and able to charge a premium for having bullied local objectors out of the way. But in this market, with fewer passengers than before, no one will pay more for someone else's expansion plans. The market for airports has been decimated: BAA wanted £2b for Gatwick, but has only been offered £1.3-1.4b.

The other, more political reason, is the general election next year. The last remnants of the Labour party may remain dedicated to expansion, but short of the whole Tory front bench being exposed as peadogrants, the next Government will be more blue than red. The Tories claim they won't allow expansion at Stansted or Heathrow (although they also claimed they weren't fiddling their expenses). Assuming they aren't lying scumbags then even if the inquiry inspector supported expansion it should be overturned by whoever becomes the Minister for Airport Expansion.

So pity BAA, who flew too high and came unstuck. A lesson in hubris for us all. Oh, and to make matters worse, British Airways, BAA's main client and ruler of all things Heathrow, is also going down the pan. Last year they lost £401 million, and there are no signs that they won't lose the same amount (or more) this year. These losses are despite their having fired around 20,000 staff, but outspoken boss Willie Walsh plans to fire some more in a desperate attempt to keep making money. I'm sure that he'll be doing his bit by taking a big cut in bonus... stop laughing, I'm serious.

Last Saturday morning eight young climate change protestors decided they'd had enough of being bombarded with aviation advertising and took control of a billboard. At a time most of us would be asleep (or just getting in from a night on the lash) they were hanging a banner saying "stop airport expansion" over the advert.

Although just a small example of direct action this subvertising was just the start of a wider campaign to counter the millions and millions of pounds worth of advertising the industry forks out for every year. Tackling climate change means rethinking what is and is not acceptable. When aviation is 13% of our climate impact, posters on every last square foot of blank wall inciting us to fly is certainly not OK. It's time we declared public spaces no-go-zones for crappy adverts flogging us shit we don't actually want or need. Take your advert for cheap flights and shove it.

Advertising executives, be warned. Plane Stupid grew up watching Blue Peter. We've bought loads and loads of marker pens and sticky backed plastic, and have been saving egg-cartons for months. Your precious pseudo-art that litters the public realm is going to get rebranded. We have high-viz jackets and we know how to use them.

Today's sermon finishes with a short quote from the Gospel according to Banksy, that famed counter-cultural sell out: "Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head." Amen to that, brother.

So yesterday we were proud to announce a collaborative comedy performance starring none other than BAA's Colin Matthews - a man known throughout the business community as a bit of a laughing stock. Colin is performing his one man show at City University on Tuesday the 19th of May - and hundreds of you are eagerly preparing to cancel some pretty hot dates to make it there.

But while the activist community was getting itself nicely worked up, Colin thought you weren't excited enough. After a quick chat with our event department, he decided that what you needed a little more encouragement. So we arranged for a special sneak preview of his forthcoming show on the Guardian's blog site, comedyisfree. A taster, if you will, of all the mirth and merriment that is to come next Tuesday.

And what mirth! What merriment! Who could fail to laugh their socks off when Colin quipped that a third runway was needed because "Leeds/Bradford and Durham Tees Valley airports both lost their links to Heathrow as airlines shuffled their slots"? What a joker: they lost their links because - wait for it - the flight was more expensive and took longer than a nice trip on the train! And I hear that his punch line, "we should all be concerned that Frankfurt has direct links with six Chinese cities" brought the house down in many a West London community.

So cancel your dinner date and ignore that anarchist meeting you were going to attend. Hop on your private jet and fly into City University, Tuesday 19th of March for a one-night-only comedy extravaganza. Tickets are free, but be quick! 

OK people, get your diaries open. Following extensive talks between Plane Stupid and BAA, we can exclusively reveal that we've arranged for an exclusive gig by none other than all-time comedy legend, Colin Matthews, next Tuesday, at City University. Tickets are free, but strictly limited, so register early (and often!).

To get your free tickets, email eventsrsvp@city.ac.uk. These are dangerous times, so they'll be checking ID on the door, so don't go leaving your driver's license at home!

Colin is BAA's supremo, and well renowned as an excellent wit. We knew he'd be up to a real challenge, so we've asked him to talk about - wait for it - "the planned delivery of a £4 billion capital investment and construction programme and the development of a third runway at Heathrow, built within strict environmental limits", or, as one bright spark put it "the runway I would have built, before it all went so very, very wrong".

Of course, trying to build a runway within strict environmental limits will be hilarious in itself, but we're sure that Colin will bring that extra spark of genius to the table. After all, BAA are known for their hilarious press releases, including "why we tried to stop 5 million people using the Picadilly line" and "sorry our staff got caught impersonating Stansted residents".

So don't miss your once in a lifetime chance to laugh long and hard at Colin Matthews. You can sign up online, and tell your mates! It's guaranteed to be the best stand up performance by any BAA CEO on a Tuesday in May - or your money back!

It's not a good month to be an airport operator. First we heard that everyone who wanted to buy Gatwick had turned out to be chancers with n'ary a penny to rub together; now a small clause buried in the sort of document no one ever reads (BAA's financial report) reveals that the Government is so worried about BAA's finances that it's ready to take control of the airports should BAA or Ferrovial go bankrupt.

BAA almost went to the wall earlier this year, but scrapped together the mother of all refinancing deals. It's also just narrowly avoided making less than it expected, which would have worried investors no end. Last October BAA predicted that its "adjusted EBITDA" would be no more than 5% below £1,015m, or at least £964m. It only just scrapped through with an adjusted EBITDA of just £968m. Failing to do so would have spooked creditors and lead to loans being withdrawn at the earliest opportunity.

The Department for Transport has been reviewing how it regulates the airport owner, and BAA told its investors that it expects to be subject to a "new duty on the regulator to ensure that licence holders can finance their activities". No money, no license, no airport. Not only does BAA have no money, it owes £11.4 billion to various creditors - the equivalent of at least three bankers' annual bonuses.

People of Britain: you remember the seventies. Rubbish pilling up in the streets, oil shortages, strikes, the three-day week and bloody ABBA. A nationalised airport would clearly be exactly the same. There's only one thing you can do to stop it: fly early, and fly often.

Why is the Government so keen to expand Heathrow airport? According to Jo Valentine, head of London First, a self-appointed bunch of fat cats who claim to speak for the forces of capital, it's to "stay ahead of our rivals... box clever and play to our strengths". We ran this through an Apprentice to English translator, and apparently it means "to enable more fiscal gamblers in the City to nip over to Monaco on expenses".

Valentine has always declared that businesses want to fly more, and what business wants, Labour provides. Except that businesses don't want to fly more: they just want Heathrow to work. Many of the smarter ones have been sending their staff by train wherever possible, because there's more opportunities for them to be working, and less time spent reading Jeffrey Archer novels in the departure lounge. In Apprentice speak, this is a "win-win" and a "no-brainer".

So it's no surprise that various business people have started speaking out against the third runway. According to the Sunday Times, a coalition of chief executives of leading companies including Justin King of J Sainsbury, Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse, Ian Cheshire of Kingfisher, and Sir Roy Gardner, chairman of Compass have been calling Number 10 and asking them to stop trying to flatten Sipson.

Ian Cheshire told the paper, which has been critical of expansion for some time now, "We feel strongly that the real business case for this expansion has not been made. A business perspective on the situation would focus much more on how we restructure existing resources at Heathrow, with high-speed rail and options at other airports, before pushing ahead with more capacity that seems to be driven by transit-passenger growth rather than improving Heathrow as a hub for UK plc."

I'm not so sure that Downing Street is listening: they're too busy trying to get jobs at British Airways. Oh well, never mind. Instead, why not ponder this lovely photo of planes on a fat cat. And some jelly snakes. No, I don't get it either...